HTC revives One M8 in Europe as One M8s

Just as its new flagship, the HTC One M9, started to appear in European retail/e-tail, HTC announced a new version of the HTC One M8 smartphone, the new mid-range HTC One M8s.

Based on pretty much the same design as the HTC One M8, with just a bit slimmer casing, the new HTC One M8s packs decent specifications to make it a killer mid-range smartphone. With the same 5-inch 1080p screen as the HTC One M8, the new HTC One M8s switches the quad-core Snapdragon 801 SoC for an octa-core Snapdragon 615 SoC.

In case you missed it earlier, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 SoC features four 1.7GHz clocked Cortex-A53 and four 1.0GHz clocked Cortex-A53 cores paired up with an Adreno 405 GPU. The Snapdragon 615 SoC inside the HTC One M8s is paired up with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage, expandable via a microSD card slot.

In addition to the new Snapdragon 615 SoC, the HTC One M8s also swaps out the old 4-megapixel UltraPixel camera for a 13-megapixel Duo Camera with 28mm lens and f/2.0 aperture, while the front camera sticks to a 5-megapixel sensor. The new HTC One M8s also got a beefier 2850mAh battery which should keep it alive for just above 20 hours of talk time and over 700 hours in standby, according to HTC.

The precise dimensions of the HTC One M8s are at 146.41 x 70.61 x 9.55mm and it weighs 160g. In case you are wondering, it is still using the same aluminum unibody.

The rest of the specifications include HTC BoomSound stereo speakers, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac WiFi, 2G/3G GSM and 4G LTE connectivity and pretty much anything else you might have seen on the HTC One M8. It will run on Android 5.0 Lollipop OS with HTC Sense on top of it.

Currently, it appears that the HTC One M8s will be launching in the UK first with a £379 price tag, while the rest of the Europe should follow soon. According to HTC, it should be sometime this month. Unfortunately, it is still not clear if the rest of the world will get it. The rest of the EU will have to dish out €499, which doesn't exactly qualify as mid-range pricing in our book.